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Matsui to have surgery, miss two weeks

Matsui to have surgery, miss two weeks

KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- Second baseman Kazuo Matsui will undergo surgery Monday morning at the Methodist Hospital in Houston to repair an anal fissure, the Astros announced Friday evening.

Dr. Eric Haas will perform the procedure. The estimated recovery time is two weeks.

Matsui has not played a spring game in one week, while dealing with symptoms originally diagnosed as hemmorhoids. He flew to Houston last weekend for further exams and continued with treatment that apparently did not work.

"When he went back to Houston and saw the specialist, they changed his medication and felt that this more aggressive medication could resolve it in short order, but really gave a deadline of tomorrow [Saturday]," general manager Ed Wade said. "If he wasn't feeling any better tomorrow, it would probably be a clear indication surgery would be the best course of action."

The surgery was originally scheduled for Thursday, but Matsui asked for it to be moved up. According to Wade, the second baseman is confident he'll need to rest for only a week before spending a second week getting back into baseball shape.

"Based on the information I provided, he could conceivably be ready by Opening Day," Wade said.

Although Matsui's surgery will fall exactly two weeks before Opening Day, manager Cecil Cooper is confident his second baseman will not have to start the season on the disabled list.

"I'm going to continue playing it the way we've been playing it," Cooper said. "Those guys have been playing -- [Geoff] Blum and [Mark] Loretta -- and we'll continue to play them [at second base]. We'll probably go down to the wire with it. It's not like he won't be able to do baseball activities after a week or so. He should be able to start doing some stuff.

"We'll see how he's progressing. If he's progressing with no problem, we'll have him on our roster and active and ready to play."

The Astros' original official diagnosis of Matsui's issue was hemmorhoids, but that was changed when a vocabulary mixup caused some anxiety with Matsui's family in Japan. That prompted the club to change the official diagnosis to a more specific term.

"The word [hemmorhoids] carries a negative connotation in Japan," Wade said. "That's why we had to go back and readjust it to anal fissure. It translates into a word in Japan that has a different meaning. That's why we flipped it over to the more graphic actual problem."

Alyson Footer is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.